


Ginger Flower, Lily Root

by TheAngelThatSlaps



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: ABO AU, Alpha Gideon, Alpha/Omega, Blood, Demon Summoner AU, Demon Summoning, F/F, Fantasy AU, Gore, Harrow tops tho, NB Gideon, Omega Harrow, Other, Violence, You'll see you'll all see, the void itself, this au has layers and i'll tag as I remember them and not a moment before
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:13:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23924422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAngelThatSlaps/pseuds/TheAngelThatSlaps
Summary: Harrowhark Nonagesimus is the last royal of the Ninth Kingdom, a destitute nation on the brink of collapse.  In a last ditch effort to save it, she decides to go on a journey to make an offering to the gods, and summons a demon bodyguard (a piece of the void she names 'Gideon') to help her.  Things go a bit awry when the demon she summons ends up in the form of a human Alpha.ABO au with slightly less keyed up dynamics, more in Notes.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 17
Kudos: 53





	1. The Ninth Kingdom And Its People

**Author's Note:**

> Assortment of things I can't concisely tag for: This is a fantasy au mostly about world-building and Gideon and Harrow's relationship because of that world. I promise I didn't make an ABO au just to talk about socio-political structures, NSFW stuff will happen. Gideon is nonbinary because the void is nonbinary. The ABO in this universe is a bit keyed down just because there aren't high-population cities with One Exception. While I have a clear idea of where this starts, goes, and ends, I've never written a work with more than one chapter, so please bear with me if things meander a bit.

Harrowhark’s advisors had assumed they had more time, which from the very grammar of it was an incorrect moment. One did not assume anything about Harrowhark Nonagesimus other than she was likely still around 150 centimeters tall, likely still princess of the Ninth Kingdom, and likely to do whatever the hell she pleased regardless of mortal risks involved, and even the former two were formidably variable given the latter.

A typical demon summoning takes time, mostly in memorizing chants and scripts, learning to draw summoning circles without something escaping and gnawing on your ankles, and learning at least a basic level of anatomy if one wanted something not especially monstrous to appear (visually, at least). This all averages out to approximately several months of work, assuming one had no prior training. Her doctor and transplant from the Sixth Kingdom, Palamedes Sextus, felt given the girl’s ability to memorize, this would be cut fairly short, and that they should place a guard at her door immediately. Her guard captain, Aiglamine, felt Harrowhark’s incessant need for perfection would slow her down dramatically, but placed several guards to watch her windows and doors anyway.

Camilla Hect, who was more Palamedes’ bodyguard than any sort of adviser, started a betting pool with the guards about how quickly things would devolve given that Harrow was an urchin incapable of patience and capable of crawling through the attic above her room into the rest of the castle. She began spending the winner’s pot weeks ago, knowing full well that the best bet is always to assume nothing and prepare for everything. Harrow rather liked her for this reason.

So she practiced her pact, learned every in and out of typical demonic trickery and rewrote it until she had used nigh every scrap of parchment lying about in her room (a sizable number, as Harrow tended to have a great many things that needed writing down but not many things that required her to share that writing with anyone, so she instead mostly amassed paper in piles). Anything unused went to practicing anatomy, retracing the familiar shapes of the rotator cuff, adductors and flexors, anything she found she could not draw perfectly on her first attempt. The summoning circle she sketched once in paper, and feeling she did not want to tip her hand, chose not to practice in chalk and burned any evidence of the sketch.

The rest of the staff waited in tense silence, praying for nothing to go wrong while assuming the worst was inevitable. Most already carried symbols or tokens of the gods, but most turned to all as rumors of the last daughter of the Ninth turning to black magic spread. Quitting one’s post was not much of an option in a kingdom as poor as the Ninth, though there were no spare guardsmen to hunt down any runners, so it was more of a question of whether one would rather die in the wilds or die eaten by whatever monstrosity rose when the princess finally snapped.

A secondary betting pool was made, and when the upper staff caught word of it they reported it to Camilla, rather than bother the advisers. Camilla agreed it was best to avoid any sort of beheading, asked to see the numbers, and laughed. All bets were on the demon being an inhuman monstrosity, a humanoid with no heart, or some sort of enchanted skeleton. She muttered for them not to spoil their own fun by being too loud, and put twelve silver down on the demon having red hair.

When asked why, she simply shrugged, said she hadn’t wanted to upset the pool too much, and that she just sort of wanted it to happen.

“Can you imagine a Ninth bodyguard being a ginger? Harrow’d be bloody furious.”


	2. Local Puddle of Void Caught Disrespecting Surroundings, More At 11

“For this task, a summons is made, for this blood, a bond is made, for this word, a pact is forged.”

On the day she spoke it into real air, over a real incantation circle (redrawn meticulously eight or nine times), a voice responded, cold, slick, distorted:

_ AND BY WHAT NAME AM I BOUND, SUMMONER? _

And with that time ground to a slow crawl, dripping over the rim of the edge of something, a finite container, limited even as it dripped rather than poured.

Harrow hadn’t needed a name, a name wasn’t asked in the text, a name wasn’t suggested, hinted at, or queried. Did it have meaning, weight? Everything else did. Was this permanent or temporary, a formality or a gift?

Harrowhark Nonagesimus felt her heart beating too fast for comfort, too loud for subtlety. She liked order, and she liked distance, and this allowed her none of those.

_ SUMMONER. _

A deep roaring in her ears told her she was gritting her teeth, too tightly, a habit the royal doctors had advised she stop, and a habit royal tutors had demanded she cease immediately. Unfortunately neither seemed to have made any impact on the princess.

She opened her eyes to see the chalk circle in the worn stone floor radiating a shifting light, red then gold then a greenish-blue, ambulating not by any order but changing all the same. The center of it bubbled, the stones seemingly liquefied into a pitch, oozing then retreating from a hissing contact with the drawn lines.

The pitch reared, then parted in sections, each thick bubble popping and leaving behind an echoing voice like a multitude, like a chorus of imperfect dissonant voices.

_ PRINCESS. _

And at that Harrow spit, unbidden and unbridled, “There was no call for a name in the tome, I have you bound by rite and you have no power here, demon. If you would speak to me so rudely I will simply resummon you under more precise terms, and have your tongue burn to nothing for speaking out of turn.”

Laughter gurgled from the pitch, hissing growing louder as the mass licked at the edges of the chalk lines, seemingly unhindered by what should be pain so crippling as to drive one mad.

_ YOU HAVE BIDDEN ME TAKE HUMAN FORM, TAKE YOUR WILL AS MY OWN, TAKE YOUR HOUSE AS MINE TO PROTECT, AND TO GUARD YOU ON YOUR TRAVELS TO THE SEAT OF THE GODS WHERE YOU SEEK TO PLEAD THEIR MERCY, BUT I AM OWED A NAME, SUMMONER. I AM OWED MY RITES AND MY TAKE. I AM OWED A PIECE OF YOUR LIFE FOR MY SERVICES, AND A TITLE, AS A GIFT. _

The sound hissed and boomed across the stone walls at once, like bits of fuel popping in a fire, there and yet travelling such a short distance Harrow knew no one outside of the castle dungeons could possibly have heard.

What the hell were demons named anyway, she thought, usually something dramatic, old, cryptic. Their names had their own two legs, while human names were inherited, chopped up and blended to make new names, passed down through family lines or assigned to those who on rare occasion had no line to call to. Harrow hadn’t had to study that sort of thing, knowing the royal lines, the lines of other nobles, that had been far more important, and now she was left with nothing that couldn’t be tied back to her. She needed something meaningless, or just something so old it couldn’t interfere with another person, something disconnected.

_ I AM NOT A PATIENT- _

“GIDEON.” Harrow shouted, her voice cracking just a bit, “I bind you by the oldest names, the ones lost to time. I have given you what you are owed, and when your contract ends you will receive your portion. Take shape, Gideon of the Ninth Kingdom, you serve me and none other.”

The sweat on Harrow’s face slid slowly and uncaringly down her face and into her heavy cowl. Time did not hang so much as drag, as she watched the pitch slow until it stilled, contracting until it lay almost completely flush with the floor, looking more a hole in space than like any matter.

And then a tendril of it, languid and strange, started to curl upwards, an inch at a time, no urgency in how it moved as other small pieces rose alongside it. They twisted around each other avoiding contact by centimeters but never touched, rising like vines along an invisible frame. Reaching higher and higher they began to fragment, peeling leaves of itself off that grew and twined closer to the others and soundlessly revolved around each other, never meeting or seeming to heed each other’s growth. They scaled and parted and grew ever thinner until Harrow could only see them as a large black mass, a tide of contaminant.

All at once, the mass was solid. A human shape that slowly allowed the light to seek its outer covering, hands flexing in oily and dirty colors until they settled on a humanoid tan, some small strips of what could be skin showing themselves before being enrobed in black. Boots, a black tabard over more black clothes, a black glove oozing out of the skin, knuckles elongating and sharpening until taking on a metallic sheen and solidifying to a polished razor.

Harrow breathed shakily after what seems like an eternity and realized she stopped breathing some time ago. There was something redolent in the last bit of air she felt hit her nose, hard to decipher around the sudden amount of blood she felt escaping through her airways. As her body fell and her vision blurred she saw something violently orange, and then nothing at all.

\--------------

Harrowhark Nonagesimus is light, they decided, and threw her over their shoulder, attempting to kick the locked cell door, testing what was clearly an old unused lock until it swung open. They (He? The form they were given didn’t seem to be very He, not that they were ever very He or She. Gideon would have to be a They name now.) strode through the frame, through the corridor where they heard footsteps, heavy and clanking boots advancing towards them.

The demon grunted and shoved the girl off their shoulder, held her out in front of themselves by the scruff of her cloak (careful not to choke her of course, it’d be best not to lose this corporeal form by hanging her own summoner), and as the guards rounded the corner and gasped at the sight of their ward hanging limp, the demon stopped, lazily eyeing them.   
  
“This is Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She called me here. I’m Gideon.” The demon intoned. A brief pause, and they shook the small person, “Wake up stupid I need you to talk to the nice humans and tell them not to kill you.”   
  
The girl heaved to life again and spat something (smells like blood) before hissing “My own guards are not going to kill me. Put me down.”   
  
The demon raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Well spears aren’t going to kill me and you’re barely alive, so no. To both of those.”   
  
The girl hissed again in that high, grating voice. “This is my demon, I am going to bed, let us through. Tell NO ONE of this or I’ll have you beheaded for treason.”   
  
The men nervously parted the way for her and ‘Gideon’ threw the girl back over their shoulder. What smells like more blood splattered on the floor as they trotted up the stairs. Awful lot of stairs in this place. Something like three flights as they followed a scent trail up to what must be the princess’s room, stupidly large and littered in books, reeking of dust and ink.

‘Gideon’ threw the limp body on the bed and nearly walked off to find something more interesting to do before they felt the white-hot burn of a summoner’s contract on their skin and growled. There’s a tug towards the girl, a call to do… Something? The contract was annoyingly worded, too boring to listen to, broad enough to keep them here but worded inanely enough that they didn’t remember any of the more important bits. They flipped the girl over so she suffocated a little less, then spat. “What the fuck do you want, go to sleep so you can be a little less internally bleeding already.”

A hand rose slowly, then snatched a handful of their hair and yanked, and Gideon snarled, letting their head be pulled to avoid the pain and found themselves level with the girl’s face. 

Harrowhark Nonagesimus spat blood with every syllable, splattering Gideon’s fresh new face. “Get the doctor, you useless thing, you are obligated to protect me, and that includes damage from your own infernal summoning-” And she trailed off, hacking up what sounded like a small chunk of lung.

And so Gideon stormed off, stomping down the corridors in fairly uninteresting boots. They would have preferred ones that made noise, the sort of intimidating ones with a more angry heel that would make a nice clacky striking sound as she walked down the halls. Stones on the first floor, wood on the second and up, they learned, walking quickly until they found a guard. They asked her to halt, so Gideon punched them, then shook them a bit before asking for The Doctor.

“Harrowhark Nonagesimus is an idiot and needs them, whoever they are. Really hoping they’re in the building. Otherwise this is gonna be like a whole long thing and I’d rather not.”

The human pointed them down the hall, said something about an east wing, and they followed the smell of something sterile and harsh until they came to a door with a nice modern script on a metal plate nailed to it. Gideon couldn’t read it, so they tried the handle, and finding it locked, kicked it open to a loud crash and sigh as a tall, boring looking human dropped something. They ran their hands through their hair, picked up odds and ends and threw them in a bag, almost unimpressed by Gideon, which was disappointing. Gideon probably didn’t even have cool teeth this time.

“So she did it then. Right. You’re a demon, the princess is likely in a state and… Do you speak? Did she get one that speaks?”   
  
Gideon frowned a bit in thought and let the human pass them in the doorway, crunching a bit of glass underfoot as they talked.   
  
“Do we not normally? Most I’ve met do, not well, but like, they can.”   
  
“Well, some can, a lot get to this plane and can’t make a sound, some get here and only speak dead languages, so I guess she either did something right or got lucky.” the doctor says, moving quickly up flights of stairs Gideon hadn’t noticed before, “And that hair… Do you choose that, or did she really want a bodyguard that screamed Notice Me?”   
  
Gideon scrunched their nose, disappointed that the possibility that she looked entirely human was growing by the second. “Can’t really see myself with human-ish eyes, so no idea. Summoner gets the final say in form, so if it’s something we can’t work with then it’s all useless in the end. Waste of an offering.”

The doctor hummed to themself, and looked back a bit quizzically before putting a hand to the princess’s door. “Usually we have to torture demons to get that sort of honest answer, you out of practice?”   
  
Gideon shrugged at him, pushing the door open before he could protest. She heard them swear, and vaguely paid attention as they asked Gideon to hold things. They checked her eyes, her mouth, and poured several somethings down her throat that made her kick and scream before settling into a peaceful sleep (Gideon noted ‘pal-amades’ and ‘he’, within the swears, so Pal was either a man or a ‘bastard’, some new gender the humans had come up with). Mostly he cleaned blood from her face and checked that she had the sort of tension in her torso humans with all their organs have. 

She ought to be dead, Gideon thought. Something so small and mortal ought to just have curled up next to her chalk and books and sent Gideon right back. She was probably in her twenties, but near-death experiences tended to age a face. She certainly smelled like something odd, weirdly fragile even by scent, another reason she probably shouldn’t have lived until now. But here she was, and Gideon was Gideon until one of them died or completed the contract, so they was a bit stuck with her.

At some point the doctor decided there had been enough blood and bandages and funny smelling liquids, and he went to sleep in a nearby creaking wooden chair that looked half ready to break as if it were the most comfortable thing he had ever slept in. Gideon wandered the room, looking around the various bits of old dusty furniture, empty dressers and beaten up tables that likely had some more interesting life in another time. They picked up and replaced a few things, curious what the limits of the new meat-body were (better than others, not that their memory was great, but they’d definitely had a summoner barely get them a breathing form then bleed out on their own floor before that which is now ‘Gideon’ was sent straight back to the void), before pausing in front of a tall thing smelling vaguely of silver.   
  
A mirror, a nice one, full length but covered by a sheet that looked like it had slowly rotted for however long since it had been thrown there. Gideon took the edge of the lopsided drape and threw it off, trying not to cough as a cloud of dust rose off what was apparently originally white. While a candle from the bedside flickered and flared at the edge of their vision a bit, they found their sight mostly unwarped and painless, more impressive biology than they expected.

They stared, a bit baffled by it all. Not all the choices were odd, black clothing was pretty normal if one got a humanoid form. Humans were pretty touchy about nudity once you stood on two legs, not always realizing they were the ones making decisions about form. Black was always a favorite though, stood out like hell once you went outside, but always a classic. They were unarmed, which was disappointing, but Gideon assumed they would be given something, hard to protect humans in a human form without some sort of pointy stick thing. To be honest that made it a little easier, they wouldn’t be responsible for odds and ends tied to their physical form, which Gideon knew they tended to forget because frankly they didn’t really care.

The body was fine, more than fine if they were honest. Broad, but not in a potato sack sort of way where it was just sort of animate and strong but ugly in how it didn’t quite look right, looking just not quite human after some summoner wanted something too big to be realistic. This one was closer to a mortal that had built it themself, they could pass for a human if they didn’t have that face…

Summoners had a tendency to fuck up faces. They panicked and would picture family members, locals, crushes, a painting, and the demon would come out a little too similar and make everyone uncomfortable. Gideon didn’t know who they looked like, but it was definitely a choice. They weren't sure if it was made under duress or thoughtfully, but it was certainly too distinct to be an accident. Accidents tended to be a bit more deformed.   
  
This face had strong cheekbones, and severe, heavy eyebrows. A nose that had never been broken, which to Gideon just seemed unreal, something only nobles had. The jaw was nice, they had to admit they liked the sharpness, though the wish for larger teeth lingered. The color choices were probably fantasy, given that they weren’t practical at all. The hair was orange like they’d never seen, and the eyes were yellow. Well, they were gold, really. Gideon had never had a strong handle on colors, given that the vision they got wasn’t always colored, but there was a depth to them that was truly strange. Humanoid maybe, in that there were rings and shades to the iris that they saw on most humans, but not because no human had gold fucking eyes.   
  
Gideon huffed, and with a small glance to the doctor and the princess, walked off without a word. No burning or orders stopped them, so they simply walked through the door as the light from the windows shifted from soft moonlight to a brightening purple sunrise.


	3. The Part Where We Have To Explain Some Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Important Facts:  
> \- Gideon refers to demons and their own person as ‘themselves’ and humans as ‘themself’ because humans have a singular existence and demons have many, wanted to mention this bc grammar is Fussy when it comes to nb stuff.  
> \- Chapter features mild description of blood and gore, a poor concept of time, and the fact that the author has never eaten an egg.

It had been what could only be described as a pretty big goddamned fucking while and Gideon decided today was a bad day. It had started pretty typically, what with the summoner nearly bleeding out and all that, but then it continued. Just a drawn out headache that felt like it had existed forever. The sun was so bright now it must have been at least a day, days had something to do with the sun changing. Probably. Having more than a few hours to play was just bewildering to the point of discomfort, and Gideon was agitated nearly to the degree of being vexed. There was no terrible rush to be anywhere or do anything and suddenly time dragged quite terribly, like the quartered limb still attached to some poor dumb horse so excited about taking off and now finding itself lost and chased by a rotting chunk. And nearby land based predators, likely.

The continuity itself was different, Gideon was used to existing as a creature who’s main goal was eating and or a quick bit of murder, and then being dismissed once the murder or meal had occurred. Most seasoned summoners (AKA the ones that hadn’t died yet) knew better than to keep demons on call for too long. They tended to find loopholes in contracts and wreak some sort of mayhem, usually in the form of more quick bits of murder, and then dismissing themselves by getting too excited and eating their contract holder. The circle of life: just a bunch of enthusiastic meals before boning it all by eating the one thing you’re not supposed to.

Gideon learned that they couldn’t just kill a random servant or creature wandering the grounds, and couldn’t cross the moat into the city proper (not without the contract burning white hot marks into their skin anyway). Their summoner was likely still out cold since they hadn’t been called, and returning to her wasn’t really a priority. Then Gideon might have to do something. Probably something boring, since they couldn’t really do any journeying with the girl bleeding as much as she was. Whether the place they were going was kilometers away or some sort of further measurement they couldn't conceive of, Gideon wasn’t really in a rush to let their summoner die because a horse bounced all her organs a little too hard.

Plus there was a smell to everything. Everywhere in the castle there were small traces of something or other that Gideon picked up and couldn’t ignore, sometimes sweet and light, sometimes heavy and dark, and all of it was impossibly distracting. Gideon had been following the smell of cooking but kept getting distracted by other trails that wound them around the castle, pacing back and forth trying to ignore the fragrant traces and failing. They tried several times to ask humans how to get food and they ran away, and one actually screamed. It was comforting to know they were still terrifying, at least to someone.

The food cravings were the final straw for Gideon, escalating their day from Bad to Actually Quite Fucking Bad. They weren’t sure how much meat a human body needed, but they definitely felt hungry. Usually they dealt with more of a primordial ooze of guts that demanded the flesh of whatever was most fun to shred, but Gideon found an unfortunate acidic cloying feeling rather than an urge to hunt. It seeped into the other things the girl had given them, the muscles, the bones, whatever the funny connect-y bits were that were keeping all that together. It was a feeling almost like decay but not quite, and it was aggravating as shit.

They eventually found a room where a human was cooking and humming to themself. Gideon paused outside the door, trying to think through what they had seen humans eat before and came up empty. They ate stuff, sometimes meat, but it wasn’t really something Gideon had seen made. They saw the human slide something out of a rounded piece of iron, and strode in ready to snatch the plate of whatever yellow flat thing it was (on the basis that it smelled good, and Gideon decided to trust the meat-body’s instincts on this one). Hairs away from touching it Gideon felt the contract light their skin up and hissed before feeling something hard and blisteringly hot strike their skull.

“Fuck.” Gideon mumbled, staggering and looking up to see their attacker raising the smoking piece of iron, “Don’t do that again, it fucking hurt.”

The human swung again, so Gideon caught it with their hand and snarled as it burned. “What the fuck did I say! What did I say! Don’t hit me with the thing!”

The human dropped the iron thing and made a face like they were about to cry. “P-please don’t hurt me, the-the lady of the house, she’ll have you hanged-”

“The princess brought me here, so I’m here. I need food. Is this food? Can I eat it?” Gideon continued towards the plate, ignoring the blood running out of their face onto the floor. Their hand lit up again as they reached for it, and they let out a frustrated growl.

The human took a few big breaths, their chest hitching here and there as they panicked about. Something about Gideon, probably? Gideon was starting to feel a bit like they were floating, so they weren’t sure.

“S-sure. T-take it.” The human stuttered, “I can make another omelette, soon as I uh. Get the blood and the uh. Bone. Off this pan. Oh gods.” 

Gideon felt their knees bend very very forward and decided sitting on the floor was probably the best answer right now. They reached up blindly and found the food was okay with being touched and dragged the plate down to eye level and took a bite that scalded their tongue. It was salty and had crunchier sweeter bits in it, and Gideon immediately felt their guts revel in whatever it was made of. They found bits of animal meat as they took larger bites, which was exciting because it was a food group they could identify.

“Do you need a fork- Oh. Oh you’re done, alright then. Very good-” The human muttered from somewhere up above Gideon.

“Do you have more of them?” Gideon asked, licking their fingers as their burns healed beneath some sort of grease the ‘omelette’ had left behind.

“I… I can make more, just a moment.”

A moment turned out to be approximately forever as Gideon crawled up onto a tall chair near the counter where the human had been working. Gideon watched them crack open some white things, chop up some plants, and yell at Gideon not to eat the bubbly yellow ‘butter’ out of the pan, so Gideon ate some out of the bowl and felt their stomach absolutely roil in protest. Gideon was then permanently banned from eating any butter unless it was given to them in meal form, and they decided it was likely some sort of magical chemical reagent. Their hands were slapped away from the new omelette because human mouths were apparently too fragile for the freshest of cooking. Annoying, but Gideon did admit it tasted better when it wasn’t frying the inside of their mouth.

Gideon was about to ask for a third when a person with very sharp-looking hair and very quiet boots came down the stairs. They smelled terrible.

“What the bloody hell happened here?” They asked, frowning but more confused looking than mad. They threw a jangly pouch at the human that cooks and cocked their head towards a door to outside. “You have the day off, don’t talk to anyone. Your wife is your one tell if you’re going to do that.” Gideon’s favorite human scrambled out the door. They couldn’t help but pout a bit.

“Is there some reason you need to move about the castle creating the most chaos possible, or are you just like this?” They asked, raising an eyebrow at Gideon while throwing salt and water in the still-hot skillet. Gideon watched it hiss and spit and eventually settle while the new human scrubbed bits of omelette off the iron.

“I was hungry.” Gideon said matter-of-factly, “I didn’t know where the food was because everything smells weird. Like you, you smell really really bad, did you know that?”

The scrubbing paused and the human carried rinsed the skillet off under some running water. They had two large knives in their belt, and no armor, but something about the way they walked told Gideon this person was much more dangerous than the guards.

“I wanted to ask you some questions before Nonagesimus swore you to silence or something, demon.”

“My name is Gideon.”

“You don’t have a name, demons don’t have names.”

“That’s what she said.”

“What?”

“That’s what the princess said, then I told her I needed a name, so she thought about it like way too hard and called me Gideon.”

The sharp human gave Gideon a look that was just a touch less guarded. “Well my name is Camilla Hect. I am Palamedes Sextus’s bodyguard, of the Sixth Kingdom, and I wanted to know why you’re being an idiot so early in the morning, and I’m gathering you’re just sort of an idiot at all hours.”

Gideon blinked. “Well I haven’t really needed sleep before so-”

“Right. Of course. Right.” Camilla sighed. “So what do you want, Gideon?”

The name was drawn out like it was some silly fake word. Gideon didn’t like it.

“Well I wanted a third omelette but you got rid of the one that makes the omelettes.”

“You ate Chef’s omelette?”

“They let me after they hit me with the skillet. Twice.”

“...That’s fair.”

Camilla paused and seemed to study Gideon’s face, focusing where Chef had struck them, the upper corner of their forehead that met their hairline. Gideon decided Camilla smelled of something metallic and heavy, an unsavory scent that made the tip of their tongue curl in their mouth, like they would need to not bite it off in a moment. They felt like maybe it was dissipating, or maybe they were getting used to it, not really getting any weaker but choosing to be less pointy and noticeable.

“So is everyone Sixth bastard gender, or just Palamedes? I don’t know the rules.”

Camilla closed her eyes and took a slow breath. “Palamedes is a man. He is a bastard maybe fifty percent of the time, but that is not a gender. I am a woman, as is Harrowhark, as many other people are. Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of… Wily creature capable of undoing even the most airtight contract? Some sort of anarchic thing who’s ultimate aim is, I dunno, destruction of the majority of mankind if not all of it?”

Gideon scratched at their freshly regrown scalp. “Never been in a contract longer than a few hours, and usually short term or unplanned summons are the ones that go wrong. Like, there are definitely demons that have figured out the limits of a contract, but it takes a lot of time and thought. I’ve been here for like forever basically and I don’t really remember the contract at all, it was super long.”

“You were contracted at 5am.”

“Yeah, like forever.”

“It’s 10:41am.”

Gideon frowned. “And how long is the trip to the seat of the gods?”

“A month if you take absolutely no breaks or detours and can cross country borders without being shot full of arrows.”

“...How long is a month?” Gideon asked, squinting a bit at the prospect of maths.

Camilla slowly blinked and the corner of her mouth twitched. “Anywhere from 28 to 31 days, which is anywhere from 672 hours to 744 hours assuming absolutely nothing goes wrong. And you seem to have the knowledge if not the mental acuity of a six-year-old and the body of an unkillable bull. You’ll also be with Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is approximately the opposite, and should absolutely not be trusted to take care of herself or you.”

Gideon grimaced and regretted the vast majority of the past morning. Omelettes aside, having a human form didn’t seem to be particularly worth the hassle of having to exist for this long. Longer contracts meant a larger payoff for more life but gods, this woman had a lot of questions and it was making Gideon deeply question if their reunion to the void with greater energy would be worth it. The great competition of being the most of the void was generally a goal for most demons, but the way one got to that point was often more random rather than any skill or greater intelligence. One only gained intelligence about the physical world by being in it, which was a matter of time and patience, and those were things that came with the mistakes of summoners with hubris (which they all had, some just had more hubris-y days than others and that was usually when demons suddenly came back to the void much larger than before).

“Gideon, how much do you know about being human?” Camilla asked the question carefully, though not slowly, after a long pause. There was a probing sense to it Gideon wasn’t used to, most humans didn’t spend time asking them questions, and especially not complicated ones. Most of their conversational skill was used responding ominously to contract choices and howling at top volume before descending on their prey.

Gideon frowned at the cooking tools on the wall just past Camilla’s head and chewed their bottom lip, playing with it mostly because they had seen humans do the same. Blunt front teeth on a weird bit of flesh that peeled at the tiniest bit of pressure was odd, but satisfying to some small feeling that bordered on a thought. Something about staring at nothing brought the same satisfaction for some reason that was beyond them, and Gideon chalked it up to new biology.

“I’ve been human-shaped a few times but um. Not for more than an hour or two? And never with this many organs, there’s way too many, I can barely sense any of them. I don’t normally get to see in color, register much tactile feeling beyond pain, or smell such a wide range of chemicals. Usually my job is to kill a specific thing, and when I kill that thing I return to the void until I’m called again. So I guess I don’t know anything about being human, other than that so far it’s been really really boring.”

Gideon looked back at Camilla’s face to find it had morphed into some bemused combination of a smile and a frown. Her eyebrows seemed to have taken a life of their own and crawled up her face into much more intensely curved shapes. The chin rested on her hand, which seemed to want to hide her enormous smirk to no avail. She took a deep breath and her features rose in unison before she sighed and relaxed completely again as if nothing had ever happened. Gideon wondered if they could learn that trick as well or if their face would always be a literal translation.

“Right… I feel like asking why you can speak won’t be an educational chat.” Camilla exhaled, “So before my last brain cells fry right out of their pan, can you at least tell me that you know how to fight?”

Gideon snorted. “Yeah, obviously. I punch and kick people, and then they die. Unless my contract says I can’t, and there sure are a whole lot of people here the princess doesn’t want me to kill I guess.”

Camilla closed her eyes and pressed her lips tightly together. “So you have absolutely no combat training.”

“Why would I need training to know how to fight? Princess gave me the fancy knuckle glove, I’m stronger than any human, who cares.” Gideon pouted. That was first on the list of faces to go, pouting just wasn’t cool.

Camilla seemed to completely deflate. “Because if you have a bunch of human organs and a human with a longer reach stabs you you’ll bleed out before you can repair the damage, no matter how fast that thick skull of yours may regrow. I know it’s difficult for you to die but it’s not impossible, otherwise Harrow would have turned you into some sort of massive dog-horse that can’t talk and had a leisurely picnic on your back while you ferried her to the seat of the gods.”

“That does sound a lot cooler though.”

“It’s way cooler, that’s not the point. You need to learn to use a sword or a spear or just-” Camilla gestured at Gideon’s gloved hand, “not that. It looks like a parrying sidearm anyway where the fuck did Harrow even come up with that. Also if you can take it off that’d be nice, people keep freaking out because you have a giant knife on your hand.”

Gideon gave her a blank stare and handed over the glove, still thinking about how they missed out on an incredibly unique set of teeth because they happened to be capable of returning to the void. Big ass dog-horse would have been worth a real death. A horse with sharp teeth should absolutely exist and Gideon wanted to be it.

“Okay so teach me to use one of those things.”

“Nope.”

Gideon pouted again. “You said I needed to learn.”

Camilla rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but I’m a terrible teacher. I like doing my own thing and I’m very good at that thing so it’s fine, but I’d probably get too hands-on and end up breaking my arm because you’re like, I dunno, three times as strong as a normal person? I’ve never seen someone just kick a door straight off the hinges before, even if this place is a crumbling disaster.”

Gideon wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, but they were learning that they liked them, and decided to take it as one.

“So who’s going to teach me then?”

“Aiglamine, the guard captain. She trains everyone else without ever having to spar with them so that’s the better answer, realistically, even though you’re gonna hate her.”

“Why?”

“She’s strict and you have the self-control of a toddler. Which is none, a toddler has none, do not ask me what a toddler is.”

Gideon did not ask. Their stomach made a spectacularly loud noise instead, and they began to stare at the pan, considering how hard making another omelette could really be.

Camilla rolled her eyes again. “Do you want more eggs? Is this a bio thing, you heal fast so you eat fast?”

Gideon shrugged. “I want an omelette.”

“An omelette is eggs. And I can’t make an omelette, I can only do scrambled.”

“What’s a scrambled.”

“Right, I’m going to make you scrambled eggs and you’re going to eat them, and then hopefully Aiglamine will be done yelling at Harrow and I can move on with my day.” Camilla huffed.

The sharp scent came back again, and Gideon felt their whole body tense. Something about it made them want to move, to get up and bare their shitty little human teeth and make a noise that would sound ridiculous from their painfully human vocal folds. If they had never been in a different body before they might have done all of it but the sheer stupidity of the act made them hesitate. While Camilla wasn’t staring, she was listening, moving slower than she needed to and never leaving her arms full. Whatever it was bothered her too, or made her wary of Gideon, or maybe she just never trusted Gideon or got bothered by bad smells but something felt off about the whole situation.

The scent began to fade as Camilla somewhat unskillfully stirred eggs and other pieces of the omelette with a fork into a bowl and mumbled under her breath that it would have to do. The pan hissed and spit as she threw butter in and made an unsure noise about it, then sighed and stirred as the mix started looking more solid.

“So Chef makes omelettes because everyone is bad at them?”

Camilla glared and scraped the fork along the bottom of the pan with a harsh sound. “No, he makes omelettes for himself after he’s done cooking everyone else in this place food, and I don’t make omelettes because I don’t like cooking and I wasn’t hired for it.”

The scent hit Gideon’s nose again with an even more acidic bite and before they could think to stop their lips curled back into a snarl as they let out a pathetically human growl.

Camilla’s expression shifted from annoyance to anger with a barely-stifled growl of her own. “You can’t do that if you want me to tell everyone you’re not dangerous.”

Gideon choked the gross little sound out and tried to clear their head of the scent to no avail. “I am dangerous.”

“And if everyone agrees with you they’ll try to kill you before Harrow has a say in it, you’ll kill half of them, and the whole thing will have been a net loss for the Ninth.” Camilla snarled, aggressively stirring the scramble, “If you can’t control yourself because of what I have to assume is a mistake, then there is no way on the gods’ unfortunate earth that you can possibly take Harrow where she needs to go.”

“Could you stop being so vague and tell me what the fuck is wrong?” Gideon snapped, still trying desperately to cough or blink whatever the haze was away, “She told me to be human, in very very specific terms, and I am. I have the lame flesh and boring skeletal structure with the terrible spinal column and knees to make me seem real and all the strength to make me actually useful. I don’t know why you smell bad or why it makes me want to punch you or why anything the fuck else has happened today, and you know more than me so just tell me instead of- of pretending like I’m stupid enough not to notice!”

Camilla’s grimace traveled around her face until she seemed to wrestle it into a more neutral glower. She huffed and shook her head, then scraped the scramble onto the still-greasy plate, swatting Gideon’s hand when they reached for it.

“With a fork, dipshit.” She grumbled, pushing the fork into Gideon’s hand. Something about the way her skin felt made Gideon’s blood rush hot and angry, and it was all Gideon could do not to stab her for it. Camilla took a long slow breath and released it before staring at Gideon’s hand. “Please tell me you’ve at least seen someone eat with a fork before? I really can’t teach two lessons at once, I’m already shit at this.”

Gideon ruefully raised it and awkwardly attempted to pick pieces of egg off their plate in a show of good faith, mostly losing it all the second it was on the fork. While not burning their fingers was appealing, this was more embarrassing by far, and they hated it almost as much as they hated Camilla right now.

“I’m trying to think of how this is explained to children but uh. It isn’t. You’re just so far behind…” Camilla grumbled, “So I’m just going to say some things and you tell me if they make sense okay?”

Gideon nodded, still struggling with the eggs but becoming more concerned with learning the fork and less with how angry they felt.

“When two people love each- no. When two people are into each other, it's usually based on like, personal tastes. Some people like a certain hair color, or body type, there’s biases and all that but there’s like a solid reason, or like an image their heart or brain or whatever’s responsible wants.”

“Sure.” Gideon lied.

“So some people have preferences for partners like gender that are more strict, like men who only like women, or women who only like women, or people who only like erotic portraiture of weird specific things.”

“Okay.” Gideon lied again, letting Camilla awkwardly traipse over this clearly uncomfortable subject.

“And there are. Some other things. In human anatomy that are apparently sort of. Either inexplicable or magical in nature that also affect this.” Camilla ground out from a thin line between her teeth as Gideon continued to focus on their eggs, “That already seem to affect you for reasons I don’t want to understand, because they’re either intentional or accidental and either one seems to imply something about someone I work for that I don’t want to unpack.”

“The princess?” Gideon asked, beginning to actually enjoy watching Camilla’s transition from her initial calm to a deep discomfort.

Any spark of energy in Camilla’s eyes died and she began to slowly deflate onto the stove top. “Why did I volunteer to come do this.”

Gideon shrugged. The egg situation was just much more interesting. The idea that eggs turned into food, and not only that, different foods, given heat and magic butter was fascinating. Plus Gideon was getting much better at the fork, even as most of the scramble escaped them. But would the giant dog-horse have been more fun to be? Could it have eaten or tasted? Gideon played with the idea and decided they would leave notes about the dog-horse and ask someone to summon them again so they could see for themselves.

Camilla in the meanwhile paced and muttered to herself, gesturing to no one in particular before pausing and letting out a frustrated grumble.

“This is stupid.”

“Yeah.”

“That wasn’t a question.”

“I can agree with a statement.”

Camilla sighed for what seemed like the hundredth time since she had come into the room. “Do you know what pheromones are?”

Gideon considered lying again, but paused their egg contemplation to say “No.”.

“It’s a thing in the air you can smell.” Camilla continued, closing her eyes and seeming to give up on whatever was prickling her before, “To some people it has an actual scent, to some people it's more like a feeling that just itches at the back of your mind. You seemed to notice a lot of people in the castle, including me. The fact that you don’t like mine means you’re unfortunately probably like me.”

“Why’s that matter?” Gideon asked offhandedly, scraping the last bits of food off their plate.

“Well for one its going to make you make stupid decisions. If you had been in a worse mood you might have actually tried to fight me and I dunno what your contract would have done about that.” Camilla said, grimacing, “You’re part of a group of… We’ll say humans even though you’re really not one, that experience similar issues of fighting with each other and being attracted to another group of humans who have different issues.”

“So there are whole categories of people and there are no fun categorical discriminatory words for them?” Gideon asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Why the fuck do you know what discrimination is but not eggs?”

“People who want people murdered talk about discrimination more than eggs.”

Camilla gave them an utterly bewildered look and said plainly, “You’re an alpha. You’re gonna fight with other alphas like me because pheromones give you bad ideas. It’s rare, like green eyes or red hair. Most folks fall into beta, where you generally can’t smell pheromones but angry alphas give you a bad feeling.”

Gideon squinted, and for the first time since they came to life six hours ago, began to show evidence of creative thinking. “Why did you tell me about why humans fuck before telling me I’m going to stay mad at you because bad biology says so?”

Camilla sucked air through her teeth. “Because alpha pheromones will also likely make you do stupid things when it comes to the third category, omegas. They emit pheromones, but basically with the opposite effects. Alphas tend to be intimidating, strong, and kind of possessive and protective. Omegas tend to draw people in, they’re smaller and weaker than average but they have the added benefit of people generally feeling comfortable around them and wanting to listen to what they say. Alphas and omegas tend to… Get along a little too well.”

Gideon nodded slowly, the train of thought they had grinding to a halt as they tried to process the concept. “So I’m going to feel human sexual attraction towards… Humans.”

“Probably.”

“Gross.”

“Well, we won’t know ‘til it happens.” Camilla shrugged, “There’s a chance that won’t happen since you’re not really human so most of your biology is up in the air. I assumed you were just a big idiot with a knife and that’s why people were panicking but the way you react to me and the smell you’re giving off both line up with alpha bullshit. It’s not something you can hide, even if you take meds, and fuck I dunno if those will even work on you…”

The two of them shared looks that were a neat blend of mutual frustration, confusion, and disgust. Dog-horse won by a country mile over whatever nonsense this all was. This was too many emotions, and Gideon was almost near realizing why humanoid forms were so difficult, but stalled stubbornly in the nostalgia of when life was simply bloodlust and meat. Now there were all these dimensions of emotion and time and eggs. It was terrible.

“So now what?” Gideon grumbled, folding their arms over their chest and angrily unfolding them for imitating human bullshit, “I wait for the princess to be ready and then avoid people entirely?”

“Nope, not realistic.” Camilla shook her head, “You need to stop in towns and cities to get supplies to keep both of you alive. Neither of you hunt or really know the wild, or frankly know how to cook, ugh there’s like a thousand things you need to know, I’m gonna need to start a list… But fighting, meds, how to not be an ass, that’s a start, we can help you with all of that. And you certainly have the time considering how Harrow looked this morning.”

“She took too long listing boring stuff and didn’t know I needed a name.”

“So I hear.”

Gideon frowned. “She’s awake? I thought humans need to sleep more when they’re hurt.”

Camilla rolled her eyes. “They do, Harrowhark is just a professional jackass. She barely sleeps normally, it takes a whole team of people to remind her to be a person. So you have a really fun job ahead of you.”

Their frown turned into a half-grimace half-pout that crinkled their nose. “Is there anything else shitty you need to tell me or can I be disappointed in peace?”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Do you want to know though?”

“...can it wait?”

“Probably?”

Gideon sighed and looked at their empty plate. “Let’s just get on with whatever else can happen in a day and you can tell me more boring awful shit later.”

“It’s like 11am.”

“How much more stuff is that?”

“Like three times as long as you’ve been here.”

Gideon prayed the void would rise out of the floor and take them back, and it did not. Today was a bad day.


End file.
